Research Projects

• Designing satellite-based insurance in Kenya and Ethiopia 

with Cornell University, ILRI, University of Twente and BOKU
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This project intends to compare the quality of different satellite-based insurance products. The goal is to assess the value of the protection offered to farmers, and to identify the best alternative(s) to design high-quality insurance products.

• Measuring index insurance quality

with UC Davis and the Global Action Network on index insurance

This work focuses on developing and applying methods to measure the quality of index-insurance products. The approach employed is farmer-centric, focusing on the value of the protection offered by the insurance. In other words, we measure how much the insurance product is correlated with actual losses, and how much it stabilizes household income.

• Index insurance for cotton farmers in Burkina Faso

with UC Davis and University of Namur

This study measures the impact of a cotton area-yield insurance sold to farmers in Houndé, Burkina Faso. The intervention was randomized, and n encouragement design was employed, providing different levels of subsidies to different farmers groups (GPCs). The objective is to measure the effect of purchasing the insurance on productive investments and well-being.

• Targeting field test in Burkina Faso

with the World Bank, University of Montréal and Heidelberg University

The work builds on the findings from the Cameroon assessment, and studies the targeting outcome from a health insurance card provision. Targeting was conducted by the community, and is compared to a Proxy means testing (PMT) targeting outcome. The study focuses on the specificity of the health intervention and of health outcome characteristics of beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries.

• Impact evaluation of a pilote cash transfer project in Niger

with the World Bank and Virginia Tech

This project aims at evaluating the sustained effect of cash transfers for beneficiary households, 18 months after they stopped receiving transfers. We focus on assets and activities to see if the transfers generated a long-term productive impact.

• Ex-post targeting assessment in Cameroon

with the World Bank and Virginia Tech

We try to assess whether different targeting mechanisms efficiently reach the poorest households in a cash transfer project in Northern Cameroon. Specifically, we compare the performance of Proxy means testing (PMT), Community-based targeting (CBT), and an hybrid of PMT and CBT.